Orations (other than the Theological Orations) 24.2–24.4

We longed for you, children, and were longed for in return in equal measure; of that I am persuaded. See a father’s fairness: I speak of my own feeling and bear witness to yours. And having been separated just long enough to recognize and test our longing by the separation, as painters do with their pictures, we have come together again. How great a kindling of memory is even a brief acquaintance between friends, for those of a loving character who imitate God’s love for mankind! How should we not, the disciples of Christ, who was emptied for us even to the form of a servant and gathered us to himself when we were strangers to heavenly things, hold fast to one another and embrace one another, and keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, which is the mystery, or rather the sum, of the law and the prophets?

This is one benefit, and the first: to run to one another as quickly as possible and embrace. For zeal does not bear delay, and a whole life is one day to those who are weary with longing. The second, and the greatest: not to arrive after the festival, nor to miss the mystic rites of the martyrs and the delight and refreshment that come to us from them. For I confess that in other things I am more sluggish than anyone, and that I shook off every desire from the time I enlisted with Christ; nothing attracts me of the things that others find delightful and covet: not wealth, which is dragged below and overturned; not the pleasures of the belly, and satiety, the father of insolence; not soft and flowing clothing; not the brilliance and charm of precious stones; not bewitching sounds, nor effeminating scents; not the applause of crowds and theatres, which drives men mad, and which I long ago conceded to those who want it; nothing of what is the offspring of our first taste, by which we perished. Indeed I condemn as great folly those who allow themselves to be mastered by these things, who destroy the nobility of the soul by pettiness about them and attach themselves to fleeting things as if they stood firm. But for that other thing I am quite insatiable and cling to it, and I approve myself for the passion: I delight in the honours of martyrs and exult in the blood of athletes; others have the contests and the victory, I the crowns. So much do I seize the glory beforehand, and so do I make the achievements my own! And by you, above all, I am overcome in virtue and lightened by your memory, and become as though inspired with pleasure, and in a way I am present at your martyrdom, share in your contest, and pass over wholly to you: perhaps because of our kinship in eloquence, in which you surpassed others as much as rational beings surpass irrational nature (for affection somehow enters into those who are joined in any way, no less in other matters than in kinship of blood); perhaps because of the suddenness and unexpectedness of your change, which is beyond word and example. For the sun is sweet after the cloud that hid it, and spring sweeter because it follows the gloom of winter, and pleasanter is the smiling calm, and the sea spread out and playing with the shores after the uproar of the winds and the labour of the waves. [6] This is Cyprian, my hearers (that those who know may be gladdened by the reminder, and those who do not may learn the finest of our stories and the common pride of Christians); this is he, once the great name of the Carthaginians, now of the whole world; famous for wealth, admired for power, distinguished by family (if indeed the greatest proof of noble birth is membership and presidency in the council of the city); the flower of youth, the ornament of nature, mighty in eloquence, both in philosophy and in the rest of learning, whichever part you like; so that people admired the variety more than the excellence in each, or rather his distinction in each part of a learning that covered everything; or, to distinguish more clearly, he surpassed some by variety, others by excellence, some by both, and all in all things. [7] Of his eloquence his writings are witnesses, which he produced for us in great number and brilliance, after he had turned his learning to the service of God, who makes and refashions all things for the better, and had subjected unreason to the Word. But from here I do not know how to use my discourse, or what to do: how am I not to stretch out a long discourse, quite out of season, by recalling everything about Cyprian? And how am I not to deprive those present of the greatest things by what I pass over in silence? That I may take a middle way between the occasion and the longing of my hearers, this seems to me the right course: to leave the rest to those who know, so that they may teach those who do not, if there are any, and both may be equally benefited, those who teach his deeds and those who learn them (since even the remembrance of the man is sanctification, and the telling of it a very great encouragement to virtue); and to recall briefly one or two of his deeds, those that cannot be passed over even if one wished. [8] I will recall his former life, and what way of salvation came to him, what his call was, and his change for the better. It is very ignoble and small-minded to think that the athlete is insulted by recalling his darker past. For then our great Paul would not be praiseworthy, and Matthew the tax collector would be among the worst, and Cyprian himself as well: the first recalled his former persecutions and the change of his zeal, so that by the comparison he might glorify his benefactor the more; the second added “the tax collector” to his own name in the list of the disciples, as though it were some mark of honour; and the third denounced his former wickedness at length, so that he might offer this fruit too to God, his confession, and might become for many who turn from wickedness a way to better hope. What, then, was his wickedness? Consider how great it was, and of what kind. He was a servant of demons, who was afterwards a disciple of Christ; and a most bitter persecutor, the great champion of the truth; troubling our way by word and deed, because of his power in both, he who afterwards was most powerful for Christians in both. How great an evil, too, was the magic added to these, the best known of his deeds! How much more terrible, too, was the lust of the body, which can drive mad even those who are wise in other things and force them to think worse, seizing reason like an unruly colt! [9] My discourse comes to the main point. And let no one, looking at Cyprian’s beginnings, give himself to pleasures; let him rather be chastened by his end. There was a virgin of noble and modest family. Hear, virgins, and rejoice with me, and so too the married women who are chaste and love chastity; for the story is an ornament common to both. And the virgin was very beautiful in appearance; let the divine David sing to her with us, saying, “All the glory of the king’s daughter is within”: a genuine bride of Christ, a hidden beauty, a living statue, an inviolable offering, an untrodden sanctuary, “a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed” (let Solomon too sing something), kept for Christ alone. By her the great Cyprian was captured, I do not know whence or how, though she was guarded and modest in everything. For greedy eyes touch even what is untouchable, the readiest and most insatiable of instruments. And he was not only captured but also made attempts on her. O the folly of hoping to rob her, or rather the shamelessness of the one who both dares such things and persuades others to dare! It was he who at the beginning slipped into paradise against the first creature; who stands among the angels to demand Job; and who at last dares even against the Master himself, who was to destroy and kill him, and brings temptation to the one who cannot be tempted (since he saw in what was visible of God a second Adam), thinking to wrestle him down too. For he did not know that, rushing at the humanity, he would fall upon the Godhead. What wonder, then, if through Cyprian too he tempts a holy soul and an untouched body? [10] He tempted, then, and used a go-between, not some old woman skilled in such matters, but one of the demons who love bodies and pleasures; for the apostate and envious powers are quick to serve such ends, seeking many partners in their fall. And the wage for the procuring was sacrifices and libations, and the pleasure of blood and the savour of burnt fat; for such had to be the wages of those who grant such favours. But she, when she perceived the evil and recognized the plot (for pure and godlike souls are quicker to catch the one at work, however sophistical and various his attempt), what does she do, and what counter-device does she contrive against the author of wickedness? Despairing of all else, she flees to God and makes her own Bridegroom her protector against the hateful desire, who rescued Susanna and saved Thecla, the one from wicked elders, the other from a tyrannical suitor and a still more tyrannical mother. Who is he? Christ, who rebukes spirits, relieves the baptized, walks on the sea, and gives a legion of spirits to the deep; who rescues the righteous man in the pit, set before lions as food, who overcame the beasts by stretching out his hands; who rescues the fugitive prophet swallowed by the sea monster, who kept his faith in its belly; and who saves the Assyrian youths in the flame, cooling the fire with an angel and joining a fourth to the three. [11] Invoking these and more, and imploring the Virgin Mary to help a virgin in danger, she puts forward the remedy of fasting and sleeping on the ground: at once withering her beauty as a snare, to take away the fuel from the flame and consume the kindling of the passions, and at once propitiating God by faith and humility; for by nothing of all things is God so served as by hardship, and he gives his love for mankind in return for tears. You long, I know, for what follows in the story; you are anxious for the virgin, and no less for the lover, whether the desire ended badly for both. But take courage. The desire becomes the go-between of faith; the lover who would betroth the virgin to himself is betrothed by Christ; and the flame of desire is quenched while that of truth is kindled. How, and in what way? Here is the sweetest part of the story. The virgin conquers; the demon is conquered. The tempter comes to the lover and reports his defeat; he is despised. He is annoyed at the contempt; he takes revenge on the one who despised him. And what is the revenge? He takes up residence in his former servant, so that evil might be driven out by evil and madness become the cure of madness. Repulsed from the virgin like an engine from a strong and noble wall, a fugitive from her word and prayer, he wrestles with the one who sent him (O the marvel!), turning back on the one who had thrown him and choking him, like a second Saul; for everything that is oppressed seeks a way out. What is the release? He flees to the virgin’s God, as Saul to David’s lyre and its music; he approaches her Shepherd; he is cleansed, as of his desire through the blow, so of the evil spirit through faith in Christ. He changes his desire, for a long time disbelieved and sent away (for it seemed incredible and marvellous that Cyprian should ever be numbered among Christians, even if all men were); but he changes nonetheless, and there is clear proof of the change. He displays his books of magic publicly; he makes a triumph of the weakness of the evil treasure; he proclaims his folly; he raises a bright flame from them and consumes with fire the long deceit, which could not help him against one flame of the flesh. He departs from the demons and attaches himself to God. O the grace! What a God he finds through evil desire and an evil spirit! He becomes a sacred sheep of the sacred flock, and, as I heard from someone, even a sacristan, having begged earnestly for it, so that he might practise lowliness to cleanse his former boastfulness. Then he becomes a shepherd, and of shepherds the strongest and most approved. For he presides not only over the church of the Carthaginians, nor only over Africa, famous to this day because of him and through him, but over the whole West, and almost over the East itself, south and north, wherever his fame reached. So Cyprian becomes ours. [12] These things the God of signs and wonders did; these things he did who led Joseph into Egypt, sold through the spite of his brothers, who tested him in the matter of a woman, glorified him in the distribution of grain, and made him wise in dreams, so that he might be trusted in a foreign land, honoured by Pharaoh, and become father of many myriads, for whose sake Egypt is scourged, the sea divided, bread rained down, the sun stands still, and the land of promise is allotted. For wisdom knows how to lay the foundations of great things far ahead, and to bring about contraries through contraries, that it may be the more admired. These things too would suffice, among the excellences of Cyprian, for the measure of a most perfect encomium. But what remains is so great and of such a kind that, even if none of what has been said belonged to him for praise, what follows would be enough for him to surpass all. To cut short the intervening details: his contempt for money, the destruction of pride, the discipline and purity of his body set against his former impulses, the philosophic simplicity of his dress, his manner in meetings, at once lofty and humane, so that he stayed equally far from meanness and arrogance; his sleeping on the ground and his vigils, in which, though he learned such things late, he far surpassed those who had begun before him; his zeal for writing, by which he educated every character, cleansed away ignorance of doctrine, adorned the lives of men, and brought back to its ancient state the Godhead of the sovereign and royal Triad, which was being cut apart and by some merged together, remaining within the bounds of pious unity and enumeration: to sum these up because of their immensity, I will end my discourse with the end of his life. [14] Decius raged against us and devised every form of punishment; some terrors were already present, others impending. He made it an equal contest to seize the Christians and to outdo the persecutors before him; or rather, either to seize all Christians or to seize and subdue Cyprian alone. For the more he knew the man surpassed others in piety and fame, the more conspicuous and brilliant he saw his victory would be if he mastered him. For in the one way he would master only Christians, in this way philosophy itself and eloquence as well. And he thought it the best generalship first to cut out the tongue, and then to lead away, voiceless and wordless, those whom it supported: not thinking rightly or piously, yet not altogether unreasonably with regard to his own wish and design; and the event showed it. For when the noble man had shaken off every attack and attempt manfully and nobly, like a rock by the sea the onrush of the waves, he was finally condemned by him to exile. The noble man was not content with his own safety, nor glad merely to be saved; nor did he consider his dishonour a safety for his body, rather than his quiet a danger to his soul, and the neglect of others endangered by the times, when there was no trainer to encourage them for the contest. For a word can add no small courage to those who strip for the contest of virtue. [15] For this reason he was absent in body but present in spirit, and contended along with the athletes; he could not help them with his tongue, but he helps with his writing. How? He becomes a trainer from abroad, writing exhortations and composing piety in words; and he alone makes almost more martyrs by his letters than all those present with the sufferers of that time did by themselves. For he persuades those who run risks for the good to put neither homeland, nor family, nor property, nor power, nor anything else lying on the ground, before the truth and the prizes of virtue laid up there; and that this is the best of bargains, to buy the kingdom of heaven with a little blood, and to receive eternal glory in exchange for passing goods. For there is one homeland for lofty souls, the intelligible Jerusalem, not those divided here by small boundaries and changing their many inhabitants; one splendour of family, the keeping of the image and likeness to the archetype, as far as is possible for those bound by flesh and able to receive only a small effluence of the good; one power, mastery over the Evil One, and to be neither caught by flight nor conquered in the contests for piety, when vice contends with virtue and world with world, the passing with the abiding, a bitter president of the games with noble contestants, and Belial is drawn up against Christ. Therefore he persuaded them to despise swords, to think fire cold, to suppose the wildest beasts tame, to regard hunger as the highest luxury, and to pass by the tears, laments, and wailing of their families as baits of the Evil One and hindrances to the divine journey. For these, he said, are the marks of manly and noble souls and of sober reason. And the example was near at hand: he himself who said and wrote these things, counting all things as dung that he might gain Christ. [16] So thinking, and so arming them by his words for the contest, Cyprian produced many athletes. And what reward does he receive for these? How lavish and generous! He becomes a martyr after all whom he sent ahead, his head cut off by the sword; and he places this crown on his many trials. So he is brought to Christ, so he passes over to Christ: Cyprian, great in impiety and greater in piety, great both as persecutor and as crowned victor, no less wonderful for his change than for his virtue. For it is not so great to preserve a pattern of goodness as to make a new beginning in godliness; the one is a matter of habit, the other of good counsel; of the one there are many examples, of the other few. [17] But what of that further wonder of his? Let us persevere a little longer in the discourse, that we may please the athlete. Such was the man’s life, and such the manner of his contest. When he ended his life (if it is lawful to say so, and not rather to call what befell him a departure to God, or the fulfilment of longing, or the loosing of bonds, or the laying aside of a burden), here too a wonder was worked, worthy of what went before. The name of Cyprian was great with all, not only with Christians but also with those ranged against us (for the good is alike venerable to all); but his body was hidden, and the treasure was with a certain woman fervent in piety, and that for a long time; I do not know whether God was honouring her love for God and the martyr, or exercising our longing, to see whether we could bear being deprived and robbed of the holy relics. But since the God of the martyrs would not allow the good of all to become the property of one, nor deprive the community through his favour to her, he makes the body public by a revelation, granting this honour too to a certain worthy woman; so that women too might be sanctified, just as they formerly bore Christ and announced the resurrection from the dead to the disciples, so now with Cyprian, the one by showing, the other by handing over the common benefit. This is the last of his excellences. So he comes into the open who deserved not to be hidden, and is not allowed to make a philosophy of his own concealment, since he is greater and loftier even than the honours paid to bodies. [18] These, then, are our offerings, and I do not think more need be said. For even if we stretched out a long discourse, we would say nothing worthy of what belonged to him, or of what each has conceived about the man. We have gone through these things as far as to discharge the honour owed to him; the rest must be added by you yourselves, so that you too may offer something to the martyr: the overthrow of demons, the ending of diseases, the foreknowledge of the future, all of which even the dust of Cyprian can do, together with faith, as those know who have experienced it, who have passed the wonder down to us and will hand it on to future time. Or rather, offer greater things than these first, such as befit those who genuinely honour him: the emptying of the body, the ascent of the soul, flight from vice, growth in virtue; the virgins their freedom from the flesh, wives their decorum of virtue rather than of body, young men their courage against the passions, old men their good counsel, those in power their good government, those in command their gentleness, those in letters their reasonableness; and, to speak of our own, the priests their mystic guidance, the people their docility, those in mourning their consolation, those in prosperity their fear, the rich their sharing, the poor their thanksgiving; and all their battle line against the evil and bitter persecutor, so that he may not strike unseen, nor shoot from hiding, nor fight like darkness, nor sport as an angel of light and steal us away to the pit of destruction.

It is dreadful to be captured by the eyes, wounded by the tongue, enticed by hearing, set on fire by boiling anger, brought down by taste, softened by touch, and to use the weapons of salvation as weapons of death; when we ought, fenced with the shield of faith, to stand against the wiles of the Evil One, and, having conquered with Christ and contended with the martyrs, to hear that great voice: “Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom promised to you,” where is the dwelling of all who rejoice and dance an unending dance; where is the sound of those who keep festival, and the voice of exultation, and a more perfect and purer illumination of the Godhead, which we now enjoy only in riddles and shadows. With these things Cyprian rejoices to be honoured more than with all others together; these he taught by his life when he was present, and these, though absent, he urges on all through our voice. Do not dishonour it, if you care at all for his endurance and his contests for the truth, and for me who plead for these things. These are the first fruits of my words for you, divine and sacred head; this is your prize for your words and your contest: not an Olympic olive wreath, nor Delphic apples, mere playthings, nor the Isthmian pine, nor Nemean celery, by which unhappy youths were honoured; but a word, the most fitting of all things for the servants of the Word; and if it is worthy of your contests and words, it is the gift of the Word. And may you look upon us graciously from above, and guide our word and our life, and shepherd this sacred flock, or shepherd it with us, directing all else to the best as far as possible, and driving away the grievous wolves, the hunters of syllables and words; and granting us a more perfect and brighter illumination of the Holy Triad, at whose side you now stand, which we worship, which we glorify, with which we live as citizens, worshipping the Father in the Son and the Son in the Holy Spirit; and may we stand before it at the last sincere and blameless, and share in it perfectly as perfect, in Christ himself our Lord, to whom be all glory, honour, and might for ever and ever. Amen.